Childhood Memories

As a kid, every summer my mom would make her famous zucchini bread out of the abundance of zucchinis from our garden. We always LOVED eating the bread but making it was another story. My sister and I were always assigned the job of grating the zucchini. We didnt have any fancy-dancy food processor so we would sit at the table with the big grater-thingy and grate the zucchini by hand. Our knuckles were bloody from scraping them on the grater so many times and it seemed to take hours to grate enough zucchini for the recipe.

A few days ago my in laws gave me a zucchini from their garden. Of course I went straight to my mom for her famous recipe! I made the bread today and thankfully, I now have a food processor so the grating took all of thirty seconds.

Smelling the bread bake and tasting the finshed result brought me right back to childhood!

Here's my mom's famous recipe (I hope she doesnt mind that I am sharing!)

Denise's Zucchini Bread
3 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
2 cups sugar
2 tsp vanilla
2 cups shredded zucchini
1- 8 1/4 oz can of crushed pineapple (drained well)
3 cups flour
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking powder
1 cup raisins
1 cup nuts (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour 2 loaf pans.

Beat eggs, oil, sugar and vanilla. Add zucchini and pineapple. In a seperate bowl combine dry ingredients. Slowly beat dry ingredients into the zucchini mixture. Add raisins and nuts.

Bake at 350 for 1 hour.

*to make the bread sweeter, omit the raisins and instead add 1 cup of chocolate chips

Enjoy!!